Many Excursions around the Delta

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I just got back from a yummy breakfast with my homestay sister, Uyen. We ate at a little cafe near her house, and had bo ne (except I don't know how to do the proper accents...) Anyway, it was beef, a fried egg, some sauteed onions, and bread, and ca phe sua, (which is the iced coffee with sweet and condensed milk).

So, we've been exteremely busy with classes and trips around this area. Two weeks ago (time goes so quickly here!) we went to Hai Thu Hamlet, in Long Hoa Commune, in Tra Vinh Province. The commune is on an island near the mouth of the Mekong River. From the boat, we could see the East Sea (or East China Sea, but the Vietnamese avoid calling it that because they want to keep Viet Nam separate from China, and not remind China that Viet Nam touches the "China" Sea. Interesting). We were the first group of SIT students to go to Long Hoa commune, and the locals really enjoyed meeting us, it seemed. We met with the village leaders the first morning we got there, and then had lunch at a local farmer's house. To get to the house, we had to cross the iconic "monkey bridge" (I don't think that's the most PC name for it, but that's what it's commonly called- it's a log going across a canal, sometimes with a handrail, sometimes not). We had a delicious meal there and not so delicous rice wine, which isn't wine at all, but more like vodka. The tradition there is that the elders at the meal have control of the bottle and designate who will take a shot with them, starting with the most important visitor (Andrew our director). Then, they progressed down the level to us, the students. I was lucky the first day in that I only had a few shots (which are much smaller than the shot glasses in the US). Every time an elder choses someone to take a shot, they take it also. Another tradition is that you can go 50% or 100%, meaning that for 50%, you split a shot. So the guest would take the first half, and then pass the shot to the host, who finished it. Hence 50%. The 100% is both guest and host taking their own shot at the same time. Also, after everyone had had a few shots, you, as a guest, could ask for both shots, and then hand one out to someone and take the other yourself. But there are rules on that, as well. Then we looked around the island some, and learned about the area. Also, there aren't any cars on the island; the only transportation is by foot, bike, or motor bike.

The next day began with an early trip to the mud flats where they raise clams. It is known as the "Clam Club" and you pay to be a member and harvest a certain amount of clams. All the clams at that time were still immature, so apparently we were spared the gift of clams, which we would then have had to eat. As we were getting ready to leave the flats, a storm came up really quickly. Our boat, which was anchored a bit off shore, had to circle around, and as it was circling, the wind caught it, and ripped off the top little cabin that covered the steering wheel! While this was happening, we were all standing at least knee deep in the Mekong River, backs to the wind and icy rain. It felt like little pieces of glass were hitting us and we all got soaked. It was quite exciting! We eventually managed to wade out to the boat and get on, huddling in the smelly hold, out of the rain, or on the bow, in fresh air, and painful rain. We returned to the port and had lunch again, partly drying off, at the same house as the day before. That lunch I "took one for the team" and had quite a few shots of the rice wine, but by eating a TON of rice, it's quite easy to negate some of the effects. Hehe. After lunch we split into groups and interviewed some local farmers. My group stopped at a lady's rice field, and talked to her about rice, and how she grew it. Some of us even got into the rice paddy and helped her thin out the rice, and replant it where it had more space to grow. I just took pictures, though, having already had enough muddy water. She didn't use pesticides because she used a section the field to raise fish and shrimp. She did use some fertilizer, though. To tell which farmers were likely not using pesticides, we looked for fields like hers, with a moat around them or a section cut out, where the fish would be raised. It was pretty interesting.

The next two days were spent back in Can Tho, offically moving into our homestay family's house. My family is wonderfully nice, and I am having a great time hanging out with them, learning names of dishes, fruit, and other useful phrases. They also have a dog who had puppies soon after I got there!!! There are four- one solid brown with no tail; one solid white with a long tail; one brown and white with a medium tail; and one that's white with cream spots, and a long tail, I think... They're so cute! They haven't opened their eyes yet. And they, like the mother, mostly have food related names, but they're pets, so that's good. There's Omlet, Biscuit or Beefsteak (I can't tell which it is), Cocoa, and then Lula, which isn't actually food related. It's just a cute name. So, now I live in a house with 5 dogs, a cat, a mother, father, two sisters, and a cousin. It's so much fun!

Then at the end of that week, and over the weekend and Monday, we went to the My Khanh Village, which is 30 minutes outside of Can Tho, but seems like a different world. It's very rural and we had to cross the river in little boats to get to where we were going to have lunch, study, and interview farmers. We learned about the VACB model, which stands for gardening, aquaculture, livestock, and biogas. It's pretty neat. We actually built one on Monday when we were there. Basically, there's a plastic bag that has an input and output, and the pig and human waste go into it, are anaerobically digested, and methane and useable nutrients are produced. The methane (metan) is used for cooking and can sometimes power more than on house and the nutrients drain into the fish pond, so the fish need less bought fishfood. Plus, it prevents pollution into the river, which is where the pig waste would be washed other wise. The farmer we build it for was really happy and as soon as it was hooked up, he washed the pig sty and we saw the first of the waste going into the bag. Rather satisfying. It should help his family a lot, since they'll be saving money by producing their own gas for cooking, not having to buy as much fish food, and, it was funny they emphasized it so much- but the women will have to work less since the methane burns more cleanly than firewood, so they'll have to work less cleaning the cooking pots. Plus, it's better for the environment, generally. We did have a few questions, though, about all the plastic used, and what would happen after it wore out (after 7 or more years). It would just be thrown away, and plastic doesn't decompose easily and can break down into harmful chemicals. Unfortunately, concrete ones are much too expensive for these farmers to build, or for us to donate that much money, as a group, even though the concrete ones last so much longer. The farmer we ate lunch with said that their expenditures are the same as their income, so they hardly have any money to spare. Their biogas (bee-oh-gaa as they say here) was made by another earlier SIT group, and it's certainly improved their lives, but even still... it's a lot to think about.

We had another two days between My Khanh village and our trip to Tram Chim National Park. We also had our Vietnamese language mid-term.... which was okay, I guess. We went out for coffee etc that evening afterwards, which was fun. It's cooler to bike in the evening, and there's a bit less traffic, but it's still a harrowing experience for me... I'm getting more comfortable with the traffic in general, though.


Oh, and another interesting thing about all our trips is that we have to be accompanied by a local government official, everywhere we go. So at Long Hoa, there were quite a few going with us to all the various places. And the more groups we split up into, the more officials we needed, since every group or individual person, if you went off alone, had to be with a government official, which I find really interesting. So whenever I go to do my Independent Study Project, I'll have to get some government person to go with me, but I think that'll be pretty easy, since I'll probably do it at Tram Chim. I think the people who work for the national park count as government employees.

Tram Chim was wonderful! It's my favorite fieldtrip so far. It's in Dong Thap Province, which is about three hours away by bus. We got there after lunch and had a boat ride tour of the park. Since it's the rainy season, that's about the only way to go (as we unfortunately discovered after trying to walk around on a dike and having a little run in with some ants, yesterday). Anyway, Tram means Melaleuca trees and Chim means birds. It's famous for the endangered Saurus Crane that comes and feeds during the dry season on this special grass. Even though it's the wet season, we saw lots of pretty water birds while we were there. There are lots of lotus and wild rice at Tram Chim, as well; it's located on what's known as the Plain of Reeds.

Mimosa is a huge problem in the national park (it's an invasive tree that spreads really quickly), and to fight it, they mostly cut it down. To use what they've cut down, they chop up the branches and trunk and soak it in water. Then they put them in these plastic bags which speed up decomposition, and make it into this compost of sorts to which they add fugus, and use it to grow specialty mushrooms. It's a pretty useful way to get rid of such a troublesome invasive. They also teach farmers how to grow these mushrooms as well, I think. Another invasive species is the golden snail. We saw evidence of it on our boat ride- it lays bright pink eggs that look so artificial on the tree trunks, right around the water level. I wish I had a picture of it, but I didn't manage to get one. And I'm going to try, try, try to get some pictures up this evening, from my host family's computer. I hope!

We also did some data collecting in different vegetation sites, which were all at least chin-deep in the stagnant water. That was pretty exciting and fun. We measured pH in the water and soil, disolved oxygen, nitrate, phosphorus, iron, and others in the water, and then collected samples of wild rice, that grass, and locus. The samples had to include roots of all the plants in one square meter, so some of us had to actually dive down and pull them up. It was slightly crazy, and people got scratched up by the rice and lotus, and all really muddy because of the sediments in the water. We weren't exactly prepared to get that wet, but it was fun, in general, I'd say. We'll continue to analyze the samples in the lab, maybe next week. I have to admit it's nice to get back into the more science-y realm, and not focus quite so much on the social sciences. I mean, I enjoy learning about the people and culture, and it's necessary to know about it, so the science has more purpose and all, but I really like doing research.

That evening, after our data collecting, we went to the ranger station where we were going to sleep. It had an awesome watch tower that was way above the trees and we could see all around. In one direction was the melaleuca forest, with rice beyond it; in another was the river channel, covered in lotus and edged by melaleuca growing on the dikes; in front of us spread out the swampy area, which was covered in water all year around. We watched a nice sunset from the tower, and then went down to our elevated concrete and tile sleeping quarters. The park rangers made us a really good dinner which included the local specialty, snails from the rice fields. They were pretty good. I'd never had snails before... Dinner was posponed though, because a huge storm came up, and the wind blew around the food, and knocked over one of the cooking stoves, I think. The rain was pounding down on the tin roof, and against the tarps they had set up. Some people had to hold the tarps so the rain and wind weren't as strong. That storm lasted maybe an hour, maybe more? I don't have too good a sense of time here. There was a lot of amazingly beautiful lightning though. It's dark here by 6.30 pm (and gets light around 6 am) so the lightning was really intense. It would light up the tower and we could see what looked like an endless wall of rain. It was really crazy. Sometimes there'd be strikes that we could see, other times, we just saw the flashes. I loved it, even though it was crazy. We couldn't leave, even if we had wanted to, since it was an hour boat ride back to the guest house, and another storm could come up really quickly. The wind was very strong. I really am not doing it justice in my description. It was definitely the best storm I've been in, though.

After dinner we drank some rice wine and sang songs with the rangers, as a cultural exchange. It was pretty funny. We came up with "Build me up, Buttercup" and "Ain't no Mountain High Enough" as well as some other songs to sing, and when we ran out of songs one of our guys and one of the guys from the Vietnamese Culture group, which joined us for this trip, made a hilarious rap duet that just went off on it's own. It was great. Then we went to sleep on rush mats under a gigantic mosquito net tent. Part of the tiled floor was still wet from the rain, and a few people snored really loudly, but it was still a neat experience, sleeping in the middle of essentially a swamp in Tram Chim National Park. Another storm came up after dinner, and it was good, too, but not as good as the first one, I think. The next morning we went up and watched part of the sunrise before breakfast, and did a little yoga on top of the watch tower. I'd never done yoga before, and it was really cool to do it with such a wonderful view. Then we took the boat back to the headquarters, loaded onto the bus and came home.

So this afternoon I'll go help to some biotech students at can Tho University, and then at 4 pm go sing some Kareoke (I can't spell). Today's our first free day in a long time, which is why I can finally update this. yay! I hope everyone's doing well!!!! love to everyone!

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Photos

water buffalo
At Tram Chim National Park, near a park ranger's house and 30 meter tall obsrevation tower.

Long Hoa Commune
We interviewed this rice farmer lady. It was pretty neat. Katie, Alban, and Sara.

My Khanh Village
The lovely ladies in my group for our afternoon project. Sara, Sara, Liz, Katie, and me.

Making a biogas digester
It's pretty cool that they reuse old inner tubes from tires to make a strong seal around the plastic and terracotta pipe for the biogas digester.

Little Miss Muffet
This is actually a tiny spider that was on a bunch of bananas near where we were making the biogas digester. I thought it was really pretty.

Tram Chim National Park
View from the tower

Tram Chim
yours truly :)

Melaleuca at Tram Chim
If you could zoom in, you might be able to see the bright pink eggs of the invasive golden snail. They look so artificial.

Plain of Reeds
at Tram Chim. I think these are the elecaloris, which I don't know how to spell, but it's what the endangered saurus crane eats. Or, it could be wild rice.

Lotus
Another famous plant at Tram Chim. We also ate them, and they were really bitter.

Above where we slept
Another amazing view of the Plain of Reeds, river channels, and plants. Definitely the rainy season.

Almost all of us
Just goofing around, taking a silly picture. Katie, Sara, Liz, and me, holding Alban.